


As Mayflies

by Anonymous



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ankh-Morpork Times, Immortal (or at least very long-lived) in love with mortals, Multi, Polyamory, dark night of the soul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:41:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 11,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29096667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Otto gets a little preoccupied, thinking about the short lifespans of his two favorite mortals.
Relationships: Otto von Chriek/Sacharissa Cripslock/William de Worde
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Delphi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/gifts).



They had two iconographs of Sacharissa as a girl.

The first was taken the day of her grandmother’s death. The old woman had never had a picture taken of her in life; it had been the family’s last chance to keep a visual memento of her. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, face framed by her white mob cap, her withered hands atop the blanket.

Mr. Cripslock, face slightly blurred, stood beside the bed. His long-fingered hands hung by his sides, perfectly still and clear.

His daughter Mitina, Sacharissa’s mother, slumped in a chair on the bed’s other side. Her hollow cheeks and sunken eyes made her look more a corpse than the woman in the bed, presaging her own death weeks later.

Nine-year-old Sacharissa stood beside the chair. Her hair was neatly brushed forward over her shoulders, and her white pinafore had dots of ink along the ruffled hem. She hadn’t owned any without stains. Her small face was quietly uneasy.

After the iconographer packed away his things and left, the family had gone up to the temple of Blind Io, pulling Grandmother in the back of a cart. The priests had said a few words over the body, waved around some herbs, and then Grandmother had gone into the ground.[1]

Sacharissa kept going to the temple of Blind Io[2] for service for a few more years, remembering walking there with her hand tucked inside her grandmother’s, and how her mother sang out loudly during hymns. Eventually, though, her grandfather got older, and his clever, long-fingered hands got slower, and fewer jobs came in for him to engrave. There came a day when the embarrassment of Not Going to Service was outweighed by the embarrassment of Not Putting Anything in the Offering Tray, and Sacharissa stayed home after that.

Sacharissa kept the framed iconograph of her family on the mantelpiece, and smiled fondly at it sometimes. Everyone in it but her was gone now, but she didn’t think of their deaths when she saw the picture. She thought about them, alive.

William took it down sometimes to look at. “You were very cute, as a girl,” he said one time.

She arched one eyebrow. “Only as a girl?”

Color swept across his face. “I mean -! You’re lovely now! It’s a different - a different quality - I - you know what I meant!”

For someone with such an impressive vocabulary, it was amazing how incoherent she could make him with a few words.

Otto looked at the picture, too, once in a while. “Good light in zat room,” he said, but his face got still and his eyes went shadowy, and she wasn’t quite sure what he was really thinking about. Not the light. He got all animated and excited when talking up the craft of iconography and the study of light.

“There were big windows in that front room,” she replied, and didn’t press. Getting answers out of Otto was not hard, necessarily, but there were things he did not talk about, and that still face went along with those things.

That second picture made her uneasy, and it sat in a wooden box of odds and ends she kept swearing she’d get to dealing with someday, when she had time. (She was a newspaperwoman, she never had time. The press needed feeding.)

It had been taken by a tobacconist her grandfather bought from. Sacharissa used to run over there once a week and purchase a new bag of pipe tobacco. The tobacconist had been a skinny man with a pronounced adam’s apple. It bobbed up and down in his throat when he talked, like a lure a fish was nibbling, making up its mind about taking the bait. He was married, but his little son had died.

He’d talked a lot to Sacharissa once she got older. He asked after her grandfather, and then chatted about the weather, the funny things those foreigners got up to, the football fortunes of the neighborhood, or how there were fewer and fewer rats around. And Sacharissa had nodded very politely, and had not shifted from foot to foot with impatience, nor wrinkled her nose at the odor in the shop. And very definitely, she kept her eyes locked on his, so that they wouldn’t follow the white lump in his throat, bouncing up and down, up and down, up and down.

He’d been an ameuter iconographer, and he kept mentioning to her how much he’d like to take a picture of her. Sacharissa, who was raised to be modest as well as polite, kept saying no, surely there were much more interesting things to take pictures of.

Until one day she was tired of always having to say no, so she said yes, but only one. His skinny face had lit up and it made her feel bad for not saying yes before. They made arrangements - he met her at a park that weekend, his tripod over his shoulder, and his face still aglow.

In the iconograph, Sacharissa was thirteen, sitting on a stone bench, her hair tied back with a large ribbon. A cane of pale roses bent down over one shoulder, showing well against the dark hedge behind her and her dress. Her dress had been cornflower blue that day, she still remembered. The tobacconist had fussed over her pose and the light forever, but he’d finally taken it.

The next time she went to his shop, he’d come around the counter, got down on one knee, put the picture in her hands, and asked her to run away with him.

They could go to Sto Lat, he said, or maybe Quirm. People were very open-minded there, he’d heard.

“I don’t want to go anywhere foreign,” Sacharissa had said without thinking, while the rest of her brain locked up and refused to move.

His hands, with their smelly, yellow-stained fingers, stroked hers, which had gone white-knuckled around the flimsy picture. He’d stammered, then. They didn’t have to go anywhere, only, only, he didn’t want to divorce his wife. They’d have to… they’d have to be discreet… And then he leaned in toward her face.

She turned bright red then and jerked herself away. She’d run out of the shop and not stopped even when she got home, with her grandfather asking querulously where his tobacco was. She ran through the workshop and up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the hall, and into her bedroom, where she’d flung herself down on her bed and thought furiously of every interaction she’d ever had with him. She’d never acted the floozy, never led him on, never been anything less than polite and respectable. How could he have thought…?!

She hadn’t gone back to that shop after that. She’d bought her grandfather’s tobacco at a different store. He never said anything about it, so maybe he never realized the switch. She hadn’t gotten rid of the picture, though. She felt uneasy every time she looked at it, but she’d been raised to know that it was terribly rude to throw gifts away.

She wrote the tobacconist an excruciatingly polite note thanking him for the picture, and apologizing for her ill manners receiving it, and telling him that, due to unforeseen circumstances, she would be unable to patronize his shop in the future.

And she never heard any more about it. It seemed to melt away, something that hadn’t happened. Unless she saw the picture, and then it all came back, knotting up her insides with embarrassment and dismay and anger. She was twice as careful after that, especially with the boys and the men who came out of their shops to talk with her when she went by, and she pretended with all her might not to understand some of the things they said to her, to laugh and move the conversation on.

Otto saw the picture one day, when they were looking for notes from an interview they took during the whole Koom Valley affair, something quite crucial Diamond, King of Trolls had said that William wanted referred back to. Sacharissa was tearing through a cabinet, and she knocked the wooden box over, spilling its contents out.

Thoughtfully, Otto began gathering them up for her. “This is nice,” he said. She looked over her shoulder at him, and a cold flush went through her as she saw the iconograph he held up. “Good light,” he said, half to himself. “Look at how it makes your hair shine.”

She did look at it. It was a beautiful picture, when she looked at it through his eyes. A beautiful girl, on a beautiful day. “I don’t care for it.”

“Zat is vhy it is hidden away?”

She nodded, and Otto slid the picture back into the box. “Zen, it can stay zere. Not everything has to come live in zer light with us.”

[1] For a few years, anyway. Millions of people* lived** in Ankh-Morpork, and most of them needed burying eventually. Cemetery occupancy was therefore a temporary thing. Once the worms had done their work, old bones came out to be stored in ossuaries, and new bodies went in.  
*By generous definition of the word people.  
**By even more generous definition of the word lived.  
[2] Chief of the Discworld’s gods; owner of loads of eyes, none of them in his head. Sacharissa had liked going to temple, but always found stories of Io himself very UnRespectable. He once took the form of a broken toilet to catch the eye of a handsome mortal plumber. Who does that?


	2. Chapter 2

They only had the one iconograph of William as a boy.

It wasn’t that there weren’t more taken. No, there were heaps of them, though usually William was in the background, a small blond boy among dozens of them in short pants and knee socks. Garden parties, race days, regattas[1], all the unending events of the social calendar. There were albums and albums of them at his family home in the country, bound in leather and full of stiff, creaking black pages with the pictures glued on. He’d left them all there, and he’d never been back.

He regretted it, very occasionally. It’d be nice to have one of his mother, he thought, except he’d sooner swallow unboiled water from the Ankh than set foot back in that spider’s nest. So the only iconograph of him before meeting Otto - he and Sacharissa had any number of them now, because Otto enjoyed combining his great passions - was one from picture day at Hugglestones. 

He hadn’t meant to keep it, but it had slid into a gap in his school trunk, an indestructible century-old artifact which he used as his closet during his boarding house days. When they were moving into their new flat,[2] he found the iconograph as he unpacked. Or rather, Sacharissa found it when it fluttered to the floor. Keen-eyed, that girl. William, not paying full attention, nearly stepped on it before she dove in and snatched it up.

“What’s this?” Otto, busy settling his imps, looked over with interest at her question.

William finished brushing the mothballs from the waistcoat he was hanging up before glancing at it. “Hm? Oh, good gods. That’s a school picture.”

“Are you in here?” she asked, voice full of curious delight. She moved closer to a lamp to see it better. This was the only way to do so because, out of deference to Otto, the windows were hidden behind heavy black curtains. The flat was perpetually swathed in gloom.

“I suppose so.” He looked over her shoulder at the long, monochrome picture. One hundred and thirty boys, ranging in age from six to nineteen, stood on a broad, grassy lawn. An imposing stone building rose behind them, half fortress and half prison. It appeared to have been raining lightly - the boys’ shoulders were darker than the rest of their clothing, and their haircuts were all flat and close to the head. Some of the boys were smiling in a dopey manner that suggested they’d been hit on the head and were still watching the little birdies go around. Some of the smaller ones had puffy noses and squinting eyes, suggesting recent tears.

William ran his finger along the line of tallest faces and stopped when he found himself. Like most of the boys, his expression was blank. Unlike most, there was a suggestion that this blankness came not from a stillness of the gears inside the head, but from a carefully crafted mask of neutrality. His thousand yard stare was a little too focused to be genuine, perhaps.

“You… don’t look very happy,” Sacharissa murmured. Her left hand moved down to twine her fingers with his.

William shrugged carelessly. “It was Hugglestones. Happiness wasn’t part of the curricula.” 

“It is not a very good picture, either.” Otto had come silently to stand behind them. He frowned down at the offending iconograph. “See that blur? Zey did not wait for the rain to stop, did zey?”

“They’d have had to wait a good long time. In twelve years there, I think I saw the sun for a combined total of one month.”

“Sounds like Überwald,” Otto commented, somewhat approvingly.

Sacharissa, however, did not look like she approved at all. She frowned at the picture, quite fiercely enough that it ought to have caught fire from the glower in her gaze. “Well. I’ll put it with the others, shall I?” Without another word, she marched across the room and slid it into one of Otto’s portfolio folders.

[1] Regattas on the River Ankh were unique. The competitors got out of their boats and carried them to the finish line. The team that came closest before getting stuck in the sucking river mud won. Their stinking clothes were typically burned afterward.  
[2] Housing was at even more of a premium in Ankh-Morpork than cemetery space. The newspaper trio shared their narrow townhouse with thirteen dwarves in the cellar, a pair of Klatchian spice importers and their five children on the first floor, a trio of pale, unmarried young sisters who bred spiders on the second floor, a banshee in the attic, plus a orphaned lamplighter and his foul-tempered mutt who slept on the stoop most nights. Strange savory scents, stray spiders, and sudden screams* were par for the course in this house.  
*Sometimes the screams were from Ms. Copal on her way to work, and sometimes they were the result of an unwary pedestrian tripping over the mad-eyed and snaggle-toothed Mr. Peanut.


	3. Chapter 3

Otto was born and grew into an adult a long time before iconographs were invented.

They did have a picture, though, of a young Otto. When he fled Überwald, he didn’t bring much with him - the clothes on his back, his black ribbon, a boxful of jewelry he later sold to purchase an iconograph to replace the one the mob had smashed, a pocket watch in the shape of a skull that he traded for a tripod, and a hand-sized wooden box painted deep forest green and inlaid with pinhead-sized emeralds.

When the box was opened, each separate half contained a portrait. On the left-hand side was an image of his father, a rake-thin, bald man in a high-collared particolored coat, black and green. He had eyes like black pits and a mouth that, even at rest, seemed to snarl. Otto had inherited his father’s build, the black eyes, and the mouth, though he’d spent a long, odious time schooling his lips to smile instead.

The right half held a portrait of his green-eyed mother. In comparison to the one of his father, it was easy to see that it wasn’t quite finished[1]. There was no protective varnish over top, and the edges of the picture were rough and unblended. The woman was voluptuously clad in a houppelande of emerald green trimmed with black fur, and her hair was combed starkly back except for a tight black braid that looped under each ear and vanished under a horned headdress. From her, Otto had inherited his high widows peak, thin black hair, and a certain delicacy in his face - features that were already evident in the small boy, sketched but not fully colored, who clung to the painted woman’s full skirt, peering mistrustfully at the artist.

This portrait box rested at most times in one of the many pockets of his opera cape. Ankh-Morpork was quite cosmopolitan and accepting,[2] but Otto had not lived to his ripe age of ***** without being mindful of worst case scenarios. If he had to leave the city in a hurry, he wanted the box to be on his person.

William and Sacharissa were too mindful of his privacy to ever go through his things without permission, so they had never seen the box. Until one stormy evening, when thunder was rattling their hidden windows, the wind was screaming even louder than Ms. Copal, and the townhouse’s gargoyles had clambered down off the roof to take shelter on the windowsills and stoop, it being empty this evening, as the spice importers had allowed the lamplighter to sleep in their kitchen, provided he kept his dog under control.[3] This was not long after he and Sacharissa had had their quiet conversation about the picture of her at thirteen.

They were in a half-circle around the hearth. Sacharissa was cautiously feeding chunks of coal to Otto’s salamanders. William was sitting in his stocking feet, surrounded by crumpled bits of paper, a pencil sticking out of his mouth, and his tea gone cold on the table beside him. Otto, having just come in, was standing over a towel and wringing out his clothes. He was feeling rather thoughtful.

At his black ribboner’s meeting, von Orlitz, née Count, had bashfully taken Otto aside to confide that he’d taken up with a mortal, an out and proud young dwarf woman. He’d brought this specifically to Otto because he knew Otto worked with dwarves all day and was seeing, no, more than that, cohabitating with two mortals. He wanted to know how Otto dealt with the …gap.

“Gap?” Otto inquired.

“You know. Zey’re so much… younger. How do you not overwhelm zem with your vastly superior experience and visdom?” Von Orlitz peered up myopically, his mole-like eyes watering and blinking.

“My vhat?” Otto shook his head, adjusted his mindset. “I do not think of it like zat. Zey have their own lives and experiences, very different from mine. Zey bring different things to ze relationship, ideas and behaviors and, eh…” He groped for words. He didn’t often talk about his arrangement with Sacharissa and William. “Histories. Just because theirs are shorter zan mine, does not mean zey are inferior to me. In any vay.”

Von Orlitz sighed in a fretful tone. His clawed hands curled anxiously around his mug of cocoa. “It is only… She is only sixty-six! She seems so mature for zat age, but zen I think about the number of years she’s seen, and vhat I’ve seen, and I vant to give her advice, but I don’t vant to come across as paternal. Zat vould be horrid.”

Sixty-six. Otto felt uncomfortably aware that if his lovers’ ages were added together, they still would be less than that. “Try,” he offered, “talking about zis with her. If you vant to be partners in ze relationship, you have to be honest about zese things.”

In the warmth of the flat, with the logs and the salamanders chuckling in the fireplace, the imps from his iconographs snoring with a sound like gnats buzzing in their little box by the bed, and William and Sacharissa both bathed in glowing firelight, Otto ought to have let the cares of the day run out of his head and just enjoyed being home. Instead, all he could see as he looked at them was the day when they would no longer be there. He had less than a century left with them, even under the best of circumstances.

“How old vere your parents when zey died?” he asked abruptly.

Sacharissa looked over, startled. William, rather more involved in whatever he was thinking, took a moment longer.

“Whatever brought this on?” Sacharissa asked.

“What do you mean?” contributed William.

“Answer ze question, please.”

They looked at each other first, quizzical. Sacharissa started. “Well, my father died when I was very little. A carriage accident. I don’t know how old he was, but he can’t have been out of his twenties. And my mother died when she was, oh, twenty-eight? I think? But, you know, my grandfather was eighty-nine when he passed.”

William frowned at the fireplace for a minute before answering. “My old man isn’t dead yet, much as he deserves to be. My mother died aged thirty-two. No, thirty-three.”

Otto said nothing, but began changing into his nightwear, stripping his wet clothes into a basket. His cloak, he laid over a chair near the fire to dry.

Sacharissa’s sweet voice pried at him. “Otto? Are you alright?”

“Nothing to vorry about.” He finished changing and turned to see them both regarding him with concerned expressions. “I had a strange conversation at ze meeting tonight. It made me think… Zere is a lot I have not shared. I do not vish to.” He looked from one of them to the other, Sacharissa with her brown hair tumbling down in a curly cloud, and William with the firelight catching in his rumpled blond hair. Both of them in their robes and houseslippers, with their blood running under their warm skin, driven by their beating hearts.

He looked down at his own hands, the long, narrow fingers cold and pale. “But I am thinking… If there are things you are curious about, you can ask. I may not answer, but I von’t resent the questions. I… vould like you to know me better.”

“Oh, Otto.” Sacharissa came across and tucked herself against him. Extremes of temperature didn’t bother Otto, but it didn’t mean that he didn’t appreciate the heat of her fire-warmed body.

From his seat, William smiled. “Wouldn’t you say we know the most important things about you already? You don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

“I am not,” Otto insisted. “It is only unfair, I think. I’ve been present for, vell, most of ze most important events in your lives. But a good many of ze things that made me me happened a long time ago.”

“Alright, then,” said William. “Turnabout’s fair play. Why not tell us something about your parents.”

Otto thought. “Vell, then. They vere both from very old, very fine families. Zey married after my father kidnapped my mother. Vhen her parents and her brothers showed up to get her back, he had zem all killed at dinner. I believe, er, garlic bread vas involved. While he vas gloating, my mother snuck up behind him and staked him. She returned to her home, ruled in her own right for a century, and then my father - she hadn’t cut his head off, so he came back - proposed to her again, properly this time. He’d spent zat century defeating a troll kingdom and a persistent werewolf pack, so his holdings had grown extensive, and my mother was always swayed by money.” He smiled fondly at the reminiscence. “They told the story sometimes over dinner, once the entrees had stopped screaming. My mother even had ze stake gilded and wore it at her waist.”

Sacharissa’s heart rate had sped up. He could feel it tremoring through her body. William was staring. Otto’s smile turned worried. “Vas… that too much information?”

“No, Otto, it was fine,” Sacharissa protested, but she flashed William a look.

William, who had grown up without a need for social graces because social clout carried the day instead, coughed. “I should’ve been concerned about you making us uncomfortable, rather than the reverse, hm? Well, aside from the ‘screaming entrees’ part, it was actually jolly interesting. Kidnappings, murders, wars… Choice material.”

“Your mother sounds quite formidable,” said Sacharissa in a tone that was trying hard to sound approving.

“She vas, very much so.” Otto’s hand hovered indecisively over a pocket. Well, if he’d made the decision that he was going to share… He drew out the portrait box. “Here. I have zis picture still.”

[1] Otto couldn’t remember what had happened to the portrait painter, but he remembered that he’d been given the man’s paint box. He hadn’t been able to use the red paint shades, they had gone all brown and crusty.  
[2] Providing that you didn’t say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, look too hard at the wrong person, kept your head down, steered clear of the Shades and the infamous Mended Drum pub, and never engaged in mimery. Simple.  
[3] Easier said than done. Mr. Peanut peed on a rug inherited from four generations back on the maternal side, chewed a fist-sized hole in the pantry door, and frightened their youngest so much that the poor tot went into hysterics and retained a lifelong fear of dogs with orange eyebrows.


	4. Chapter 4

It was not an exaggeration to say that iconography was Otto’s life. All day, he traipsed around the city, carrying his iconograph, tripod, and cage of salamanders, or supervised the picture printing at the _Times’s_ headquarters in Gleam Street. At night, he didn’t need that much sleep, so for hours after Sacharissa and William had collapsed into the king-size bed, he stayed up, fussing with filters and lenses, having whispered conversations with the tiny, thumb-sized imps[1] who dwelt inside the box.

Imps only lived[2] two to three years, typically, but Otto took very good care of his. Four years was more the norm, and little acid-green Gerolf had been with him for six. But lately, Gerolf’s painting speed had been slowing down, his reedy voice had gotten scratchy and faint, and he didn’t participate much in the nightly conversations.

At iconography shops, prospective buyers were advised not to name their imps. The minute entities didn’t have senses of self - they were created as extensions of their task, basically. The painting of pictures was all that they existed for. They didn’t respond to names if they were given to them, of course. Their one-track minds didn’t have the capacity to recognize them as their own or attach them to others. (Imps from the Dis-organizer series of products, who had to keep track of people and places and dates, might have been capable of the feat if anybody had cared[3] to try testing them.)

Otto named them anyway. His collection of iconographs had grown as the _Times_ grew, much to the consternation of William and Sacharissa whenever his expense budget landed on their desks. As he had several dozen imps to keep track of, naming them made it easier.

Gerolf was from his second iconograph, the one he’d purchased in a little city on the Sto Plains as he made his way from the old country to Ankh Morpork. It was a shabby little box, and now much worn down by use. But however poor the quality of the iconograph, the imp inside it had been top tier. Otto had tried many times over the years to persuade Gerolf to take up residence in one of his new, fancier iconographs, with all their bells and whistles. But imps were, by nature, extremely territorial[4]. Gerolf refused to leave his box, even as the fabric coating wore off and the cardboard sides rotted away around him.

Now, on another stormy night, his small form was collapsing, bit by bit, into a cloud of loose, colored smoke. The other imps gathered around to watch. Otto couldn’t tell if they comprehended what was happening, or if they were just being their usual nosy selves. Otto stood over the desk where Gerolf lay, knitting and twisting his long fingers together unhappily. There wasn’t anything he could do to assist the tiny creature’s passing, so all he could do was, like the other imps, watch.

[1] Imps: artificial, thaumaturgic lifeforms created by wizards to perform basic tasks. They had excellent, but specific and specialized, modes of thought and absolutely no imagination. The imps that made iconographs function had a highly visual perspective on the world, so it was no surprise that their conversational skills were not quite up to par. Regardless, they had many opinions on their working conditions which they were quite happy to share, and these often led to inventions or breakthroughs for the Ottos of the world.  
[2] Again, for a generous definition of lived.  
[3] Nobody did. Studies carried out by some worryingly keen researchers from Bugarup University had determined that, gram for gram, Dis-organizer imps were the most annoying beings on the entire Disc.  
[4] This was how the manufacturers of imp-powered devices stayed in business.


	5. Chapter 5

Sacharissa woke, deliciously warm and comfortable under several layers of blanket, with Will’s chest pressed against her back. The banked fire made a hissing noise in the hearth, almost drowned out by the hissing of the rain still coming down outside. She poked a foot out, made a hissing noise of her own, and pulled it back in hurriedly. The covered windows meant they had some insulation, but their flat was basically just one large room, and it was an icebox in the mornings.

“Stiffen your spine,” she said to herself, and pushed herself off the bed and to her feet in one smooth motion. In the bed behind her, Will groaned unhappily at the sudden rush of cold air. She snatched up a patched and ancient bedrobe inherited from her grandfather and wrapped herself in it. 

It was impossible to tell the hour in the dark room. From a drawer beside her bed, she drew a packet of matches and lit the table lamp. In its light she pulled a silver pocketwatch from her robe and checked the time. A Hogswatch present from Gunilla and Bodony a few years ago, its lid was etched with a depiction of their first printing press. It was engraved on the inside lid with the words Feed Me, and she smiled wryly every time she saw it. They had a dozen presses now, and three buildings, all in Gleam Street where they’d started. The staff could pour as many articles as they liked into those machines and never slake their hunger.

Speaking of… She poked William’s huddled form. “Up, up. You’ve got a morning edition to look over.”

“Must I?” he grumbled, but he winced his way up regardless. Sacharissa looked toward the closet[1] Otto slept in, expecting their voices to have drawn him out as usual, but the door stayed closed. Odd.

She went to the fireplace, stirred the coals back to life, put a kettle on, fed the salamanders, and made tea while William creaked around behind her, getting dressed. He sat by the fire to pull his boots on and finally noticed that it was just him and Sacharissa this morning. “Huh. Where’s Otto?”

Sacharissa handed him a steaming cup of Earl Ecru tea before going over to tap at the closet door. “Otto? Darling?” There was silence from the other side. She opened it cautiously, but it was empty except for an industrious spider or two.

“He must have gone out,” she said, frowning. She and William were both light sleepers. It was nearly impossible that someone could come to get Otto and not wake them as well, so Otto, who moved as silently as a shadow when he wanted, must have left on his own.

William grunted as he got a recalcitrant boot on. “Maybe wanted a picture of the sunrise.”

Otto did things like that sometimes, going out to take pictures of the sky or trees or flowers or buildings, just for the pleasure of it. It didn’t seem likely this morning, Sacharissa thought, as she peeled back a curtain to look at the weather. The sun wasn’t up yet, and the rain made things even darker. “It’s coming down hard out there.”

William was now occupied with fixing breakfast. “He knows his own business. Don’t worry about him.”

“I know. It’s just…” She shook her head. She was worried over nothing. “Forget it.” She took off her robe and nightgown and began to get dressed for the day. Corset over chemise, and a corset cover over that. Two layers of petticoats, and a bumroll tied around her hips[2] , then stockings, garters, and a neat blue calico dress with small pearl buttons down the front, and calf-high button boots. It was cold, so she added a fitted three-quarters navy jacket with black frogging and tucked her gloves inside a fur muff for later wear. Her notebook, pencase, and watch tucked into her coat pockets. She let her hair out of its sleeping braid and pinned it neatly up, tucking it under a veiled and broad-brimmed hat, to better keep off the rain.

By the time she was ready, though she always dressed as fast as she could, William had finished cooking breakfast and eating his portion. He handed her a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage, with a leftover marmalade roll, kissed her on the cheek, and took off, clattering down the stairs.

She ate in a hurry. She had a service at the temple of Offler the Crocodile God to attend this morning - the dedication of a new statue was happening today, and as Ring-The-Doorbell-Thrice-Three-Times-Before-Leaving[3] Venables, their usual Religions correspondent, was off on maternity leave, Sacharissa was covering the event. 

She looked again at Otto’s closet before she left. He’d been strange, she thought, this last week, since the night he’d showed them his parents’ pictures. Some strangeness was to be expected in a vampire, of course. But it was worrisome, all the same. She decided she’d pick up some cocoa while she was out today.

[1] Vampires felt most comfortable sleeping upside down, in dark, enclosed spaces, or best of all, both. Otto shared the bed with them, but rarely slept in it.  
[2] Waistlines had dropped again, but sadly, there was no end in sight to the reign of the bustle in Ankh Morpork ladies’ fashion.  
[3] Three Times, as was her office nickname, was a devout Omnian, but she relished her job covering the city’s bubbling religious scene, claiming it helped her hone her arguments that Om was the only deity worth believing in. The coworkers who sat near her nodded whenever she brought this up, trying not to look too grateful. Before she’d switched to the Religions beat, she’d honed her arguments on them.


	6. Chapter 6

It was a miserable not-yet-morning, and William held his upturned coat collar closed at his throat while he splashed his way to Gleam Street. He’d forgot his umbrella at the office, so the rain ran in streams off his hat, before and aft. The hour was just before that of the changing of the guard - the midnight crew of the city making way for the daytime hordes. Will waved at young Bertram and his dog as he passed them at a streetlamp snuffing the light out. Gnoll families with their steaming carts trundled their way toward the city gates, heading for Harry King’s waste recycling facility downriver. Watchmen, shivering under their leather capes, proceeded back to their watch houses for the shift change, and licensed thieves, their most profitable hours over, yawned as they toted their bags of ill but legally gotten loot to their Guildhouse. Lights leaked through shuttered shop windows and the wood and canvas awnings of street stalls were being opened by cursing apprentices.

The _Times_ was no different. The urchins and unlicensed beggars who hawked the papers were queuing up, yawning, stretching, cursing, and scratching their various disfiguring but non-painful skin ailments. Passing the head of the disorderly straggle, William blinked rapidly as his eyes began watering, his nose started running, and his earwax began to liquefy.

It was the Smell[1] of Foul Ole Ron. Foul Ole Ron himself was not on hand, though he and his Canting Crew had been instrumental in the early days of the paper. As the Times had found its footing, though, they’d decided that paper-selling was too much like proper work, and therefore against their code. They and the staff of the _Times_ had all parted on good terms, and the Smell occasionally still dropped by for old times’ sake, with the bonus of perusing the Arts & Culture column while it was fresh[2].

The headquarters consisted of two warehouses, the one taken over from the _Inquirer_ and one adjoining. Here Gunilla and Boddony Goodmoutain directed the setting, printing, and folding of the newspaper in cavernous, shaking rooms filled with the thunder of the presses. On the Ankh side of the warehouses was a narrow two-story building where the journalists turned their notes into stories, and the editors turned those stories into publishable stories.

Donni Longsnap[3], the night editor, met William at his desk. Donni was a third-generation city dwarf, and while he wore the cultural battle axe slung at his waist, his notebook, fountain pen, and screw-top inkpot hung right next to it. He already had the planned pages of the morning edition spread out on William’s desk and his own chair pulled up. “Morning, Bill. Really pissing down out there, I see.”

William, his socks squishing in his shoes, hung up his sodden hat and coat. “Quite. Mr. Clemently is to be congratulated. Right again[4].”

“Right as rain, you might say?” grinned Donni.

Wordlessly, William wrung out his handkerchief.

“Down to business, then.” Donni’s hands flew over the paper, pointing out articles. “The Pseudopolis Watch extradited that fellow who robbed the Museum of Quite Unusual Things, and he got in on train last night, we got a nice picture of the handoff to Captain von Humpeding. We got the review of the Opera House’s _The Lightly Cursed Mandolin_ , we got Rocky’s report on the UU vs. BU matchup - our lads won, but there was a giant hen delay about three-quarters through. King of Lancre’s sent a clacks again, saying nobody’s given birth to any mongooses. Relations between Borogravia and Mümerath are wearing thin, I’m expecting a clacks any second with the declaration of war, so I left a space there for it. And we printed that correction of Mrs. Pinkshid’s name.”

“What’s this?” William tapped an article.

“Lullen Bridge Flasher arrested.”

“Yes, I can see the headline. But take out the iconographs. The _Times_ is above such things.”

Donni screwed up his face. “Must I? All I’ve got to replace ‘em are the minutes of the Ankh-Morpork Miniature Rose Society and they’re minute and miniature indeed, it’ll only take up a fourth of the space; I wanted you to have ‘em as filler.”

“What? That’s it?”

The night editor shrugged. “Slow night. They happen sometimes.”

“There must be something,” said William. He dug through his in-tray. Something small, with a quick turnaround time… He found an envelope. Out of it slid some iconographs. He hesitated then drew one at random and handed it to Donni.

“There we go. Date and grower’s information is on the rear.”

Donni gave him a flat, I-can’t-believe-you’re-asking-me-to-do-this look. “Really? Funny shaped fruit and veg?”

William raised his hands. “What can we do? They’re popular. When we go too long without one, we get complaints. And if we put them on - What are you doing?!”

That last was addressed not to Donni, but to Tartle, the intern. The young man looked up from spreading paper underneath the dripping hatstand. “Uh, just mopping up, Mr. de Worde?”

“Not with the newsprint, you aren’t. Go get a dustrag!”

Tartle hurried off. William stood and peeled the soggy broadsheets off the floor, holding them ruefully aloft. An iconograph of Queen Kelirehenna I at her Pearl Jubilee smiled splotchily out at him, and the ruby ink of her gown was running down into a column of text about the opening of a new railway station in Chirm. That was how it was in this business. One day, you were covering important historical events, and the next, your work was being used to sop up rainwater. Or getting stuffed under doors as a draft excluder. Or lining the bottom of budgie cages. Or… Well, it was ephemeral, and that was all there was to it.

“Well, Donni, is that all?”

Donni stood, gathering up the test pages. “Right-o. I’ll just go see about that Borogravia clacks.”

“Thank you. Oh, by the by, have you seen Otto?”

“Yeah, he came in last night, round about midnight. He’s been in his darkroom ever since.”

William nodded slowly. “Thanks again, Donni.” The dwarf left, and William opened up his schedule book, checking story deadlines. But he felt somewhat unsettled, uneasy, and he couldn’t slip into his comfortable routine. Running a newspaper wasn’t a job to take it easy in, and he was losing precious minutes. The floor and walls began to vibrate, then to shake, signifying the morning edition going to press.

After ten minutes of unprofitably trying to divide stories between staffers - he’d made the same note to send Mrs. Tilly to the Tanty[5] three times - he went downstairs. Otto’s darkroom was in the basement, exactly as in the shed they’d started out from. The door creaked when opened, and the rickety wooden staircase below vanished into gloom. Its steps were both too shallow and too steep for comfort, and William avoided it if he could. “Otto?”

There was a quiet slithery noise, but no reply. “Otto? You down there, dear chap?” There continued to be no reply. There was no help for it, William was going to have go down those stairs. He clung to the handrail, navigating down in perfect darkness, white-knuckled. Otto, with perfect vampiric grace and night vision, had no trouble with the stairs. The dwarfs, with their shorter legs, actually preferred the awkward briefness of the steps here to the human-sized ones between the first and second stories, and as a race who’d developed their whole society underground, the lack of light didn’t bother them.

Even Sacharissa, in her tiny, high-heeled button boots, traipsed up and down with ease. “Oh, there’s worse ones all over the city,” she said, when he asked how she managed it.

William, on the other hand, had grown up in a fully-human countryside house, filled with very human, very fragile servants. There were two types of staircases in manor houses: the grand and sweeping sort in the front of the house, which the family used. And narrow deathtraps behind, which the servants were expected to use as they toted heavy baskets of laundry and broad platters of food. One of William’s earlier memories was watching as an upstairs maid was taken away on a door, neck broken, unable to do more than moan and blink.

When he reached the bottom, bones all intact, he heaved a relieved sigh. “Otto?” he called, taking one hesitant step forward.

A match flared in the abyssal gloom. “Yes, Villiam?”

William heaved another sigh, full of a different kind of relief. “Oh, good. Listen, answer when I call you next time.”

Otto’s silhouette bent over slightly, then a candle caught. It cast only a limited pool of brightness, but it seemed light as day in comparison to before. “I did answer vhen called. Just now.”

“You didn’t hear me earlier? I called twice before coming down.”

“Oh. My apologies, Villiam. I vas distracted.” He seemed distracted even now. There was a polite smile on his face, skin-deep, and there was something weird about his voice. His accent, William realized. Otto, alone with he and Sacharissa, dropped most of it beside the persistent v’s. At the moment, though, it was as heavy as he’d ever heard it.

“You feeling alright?”

“Fine, Villiam. I am absorbed in my vork. Zat is all.”

William looked around. The salamanders had been left at home today, and the desk was empty of imps. Iconographs were scattered across the desk and table, and hanging as dim, square shapes just above head height, but there was something indefinable about them, like a still-made bed, that said they hadn’t been touched.

On the other hand, Otto said he was fine. “Alright. Good. Good. Don’t forget to get over to the Palace later, there’s that interview with the Genuan[6] Baroness.”

“Of course. Zank you for reminding me.”

“Yes. Well. Good. That’s all, then.” He turned to go up the stairs again. They seemed even more terrifying now that he could half-see them. He glanced over his shoulder and a chill went through him. The candle was reflecting in Otto’s eyes, making them seem to glow ruby red. He hesitated, then spoke. “Otto… I don’t want to offend, but you sure you’re well? We’ve got cocoa in the canteen, and an emergency black pudding…”

“Your concern is very touching, Villiam, but zese zings are not necessary.” He smiled, and the candlelight glinted on his sharp white teeth. “I appreciate zat you ask.”

[1] The Smell was so distinct and specific that it had developed its own personality, a surprisingly genteel one. It appreciated the arts, and often left Ron on his own so it could take in poetry readings, plays, concerts, and gallery openings. Despite the general fear and loathing its unblockable presence provoked among the artistes whose works it attended, there had come to be a certain cachet to having the Smell disgracing an event. Ms. Daniellarina Pouter, modern artist, had even created an exhibition commenting on the Smell’s uniquely corrosive habits. _Before and After_ had featured statuettes of the city’s artistic luminaries made of shining copper and brass set between mirrors of silvered glass, in the expectation that the Smell’s presence would turn them into greenish lumps between black panels. The Smell was quite excited to participate in this exciting interplay between art, artist, and beholder, but sadly, Foul Ole Ron, who was getting on in years, had a hacking fever the week of the exhibition’s run. The Smell found itself unwilling to leave his bedside, lest the worst should occur. Ms. Pouter, disappointed, deployed her backup plan and turned loose a dozen skunks in the gallery. The surviving attendees, after recovering by repeated baths in tomato juice, condemned the exhibit as a disappointment. Ms. Pouter took the critical articles, had them pulped and reassembled as a roll of No. 13, coarse, at Harry King’s factory, submitted the result alongside a hand-fired chamberpot as _The Second Run_ , and won $10,000.00 AM for it.  
[2] It was certainly not fresh once the Smell was through with it, and had to be binned, and then the bins emptied at once.  
[3] Longsnap was a contraction of an ancient family name, Longestnap. Snorri Longestnap had got the name after lying down one Hogswatch Eve, claiming he was too tired to eat his husband’s Hogswatch Cake. Fogarth Longestnap was a famed dwarf bread baker, and his cake had picked up some of that comestible’s famously rock-like and inedible properties. Every time Snorri opened his eyes for the next century, he saw the plate of cake lying in front of him, and resolutely went back to sleep.  
[4] Weather prediction, despite the network of observation stations enabled by the clacks, was still based on more luck than science. Mr. Innes Clemently, the Times’ weatherman, was also a card-carrying* member of the Gamblers’ Guild.  
*Many, many cards, most with inconspicuous marks and nonstandard wear patterns.  
[5] The Tanty was the city’s main prison, and though Mrs. Tilly’s vicious nature might make her a natural fit for and eventual ruler of the place, William was only sending her to cover the morning’s hangings.  
[6] As opposed to a Counterfeit baroness, a title that didn’t exist. The small island nation of Feit on the coast of the Counterweight Continent, with sixty-six citizens, was too small to support any elaborate system of nobility.


	7. Chapter 7

Down in his darkroom, Otto heard William come in. He listened to the smooth, rich timbre of his voice as he discussed the morning edition with Donni Longsnap, the racing of his pulse as he navigated his way up and down the fearful staircase. Two and a half hours later, Sacharissa arrived, the staccato of her footsteps unmistakable, quick across the floor. Her light, matter-of-fact tone mixed with the scratching of her quill pen as she wrote up an article and ordered staffers around. Then their two voices talking together, their hearts beating close to each other as William pulled Sacharissa into a corner to chat about… what? They were whispering, he couldn’t hear the words clearly. He had a feeling, though, that it was about him.

Why should that be so? He was perfectly normal, today, as every day. Everything was fine with Otto.

He had iconographs to take. Yes. He gathered up his equipment, whistling for his imps to hop in. The meeting with Baroness Saturday, to take a portrait to go with the interview Sacharissa was going to do, was in the afternoon. He would go out and take pictures of the city until then. Ankh Morpork was a bustling metropolis of interest and delight[1]. There were so many things to take pictures of.

He sloshed out into the rain. The light was dull and grey, the edges of everything obscured by a pattering mist. That was fine. He was not desperate for gorgeous rays of light and lovely sharp shadows to distract himself with. Dull and foggy. That was fine.

He held himself together through the day. When the bells of the city reached a consensus of two o’clock, he went to the palace. Sacharissa was waiting for him at the gate. There was no break in the drizzling clouds overhead, but all the same it seemed to Otto that a golden sunbeam lanced down and shone in her brown curls. Her heart beat faster when she looked over and saw him coming. He swallowed, breathed shallowly.

“Hello, Sacharissa.”

“Right on time, Otto,” she smiled. Was there an edge of worry to her face? No. They were both fine, both competent professionals doing their jobs. She was merely glad he hadn’t made them late. The Baroness Saturday was only visiting Ankh-Morpork for a week, and only had a narrow window in her schedule to speak with them.

The Baroness was a beautiful woman. She spoke to Sacharissa about life in Genua[2], the struggle to preserve its culture after the disruptive upheaval caused by Lilith. Otto fussed around with lamps and mirrors and reflectors while they talked and Sacharissa’s pen scratched. The light was terrible, but she had the kind of face it was a joy to try and capture, lovely from every angle. The Baroness, he meant. He was certainly not distracted looking at Sacharissa.

“Come visit someday,” the Baroness said as Sacharissa snapped her handbag shut and stood to go. “Consider this an invitation to write a… what do you call it? …a travel feature.”

Sacharissa smiled, giving nothing away. “I’ll take that to my editor. Thank you very much for your time today, Baroness.”

At the palace door, a silent, white-gloved servant presented Sacharissa with her umbrella. He appeared and vanished from the vestibule with the impersonal smoothness of clockwork, but Otto heard his gait relax on the far side of the door, heard him comment approvingly about Sacharissa’s figure to his fellows over there, heard the way all their pulses rose a fraction.

Sacharissa’s umbrella stuck halfway open. She shoved at it, and Otto watched the fine bones in her hand flex and the knuckles turn white with force. “Well,” she grunted, and it snapped open, “ah! I’m headed back to the office to write this up.” She twirled the umbrella over her shoulder like it was a lacy summer parasol instead of a flapping black thing with a painfully sharp spike at the tip. “Coming with me?”

He nodded. They walked back together. The rain hit the cobbles in large, emphatic drops, spattering thick brown mud on the hem of her blue dress, and on his black suit pants and opera cloak. Ankh Morpork didn’t stop for a little thing like rain, and the crowd was thick, their breaths a heavy fug in the air, their bodies a warm press as Otto and Sacharissa squeezed their way through.

When they reached the Gleam Street Offices, Otto went down to his cellar. He had iconographs to look over. It made sense for him to go there. He was, in no way, hiding. He did not spend the next seven hours with his ears pricked[3], listening through the cellar floor for every breath and grunt and sigh they made. When William called down at ten that he and Sacharissa were headed home, Otto called back, “Just finishing zings here. Don’t vait up.”

He sat in the dark and listened to his imps chatter, their small complaints about the upsets to their schedules. He was perfectly fine. When enough time had passed, he went home. 

Unfortunately, William and Sacharissa had stopped at the shops. This meant that they were not asleep when he came in, they were undressing for bed. Will sat in his chair by the fire, his long stockinged legs stretched out toward the warmth. He was yawning and tousle-haired, undoing the buttons at the neck of his shirt one by one, the firelight catching gold all over him. Sacharissa stood by the bed, loosening the laces of her corset, sighing with relief as she pulled it over her head and tossed it onto a chest. There was still rain dampness to her hair, leaving chestnut tendrils clinging to her rosy cheeks and plump shoulders and graceful neck.

Otto had come in silently. He left in the same silence, walking blindly through the patchwork streets. Time, he thought distractedly, time was the enemy. It crept on with no regard for the waning of all mortal things. 

The rain pounded down around him, but didn’t touch him[4].

A war raged inside Otto between a desire to hold them close and never let them go, and a flesh-creeping urge to run, to flee, to get out while he could, before the cold and skeletal hand of time closed over them and broke his heart forever.

Vampires, especially vampires in the kind of turmoil Otto was in, are natural drama bombs, capable of distorting the reality around them. And so a war raged in the skies above, too. The gloomy, grey, humdrum steadily pouring misery of an Ankh Morpork storm system was torn apart by the towering, striking, shrieking black and purple theater of Überwaldean thunderheads. 

Unaware of the effect he was producing, Otto walked on.

A small, roughly cone-shaped figure stepped into an alley as he passed, then popped its head out again to watch him go. “Hm,” it said, and then shuffled off, hoisting a patchy broom up over its shoulder.

[1] This was a description of technical truth, provided you looked at it from the perspective of a fly, louse, cockroach, or similar. From this small scale viewpoint, Ankh Morpork seemed a paradise on earth, though ‘so many things to take pictures of’ should be substituted with ‘so many things to take a bite of’.  
[2] A gleaming city with a spired castle like something out of a fairytale, surrounded by mossy swamps full of exotic creatures like something from a fever dream. Or maybe the comparisons should reverse. Otto couldn’t spare the mental energy to straighten it out. He was taking pictures, not thinking.  
[3] Otto’s ears were on the pointy side, but this statement was not literal. Just so you know.  
[4] It was afraid to. So were a gang of unlicensed muggers, who stepped out with knives and coshes, thought better of it, went home, and changed their lives to quiet ones of honest virtue from that night on.


	8. Chapter 8

It was clear Otto hadn’t slept in his closet last night. The spiders’ webs were larger than the day before. Sacharissa observed the empty space with dismay, and exchanged a worried glance with William. “What are we supposed to do?" she asked. “Do we take him aside for a conversation? Do we find another Black Ribboner and stage a, I don't know, an intervention?”

William fiddled with a slice of toast. "He's our partner. We should talk to him."

"You're right. Perhaps we’re leaping to conclusions. We don't know what's really going on in his head."

Will drummed his fingers on the table. Sacharissa did up her buttons with unnecessary force. "But -" they both said at the same moment. 

"Just in case," Will said diffidently, wiping jam off his hand, "we should let Gunilla and Boddony know what we're doing."

"Only so they're prepared, in case we're not jumping to conclusions," said Sacharissa.

She hurried through her morning routine with her usual crisp briskness, but William dawdled, so that for once they left at the same time. At the base of the stairs, Bertram was standing with his thumbs in his pockets, looking aggrieved. "You're late," he said, glaring at William, and Mr. Peanut, responding to the aggression in his master's voice, launched himself at William's shins.

"Yow! Off!" William defended himself, using his umbrella as a shield and what he thought was a firm and commanding voice. "Mr. Peanut, get back!"

"We been waiting all morning for you," Bertram accused, making no move to assist. "This old lady come up to us and said we were to give you this, and that if'n we didn't, we'd regret it."

"An elderly lady?" Sacharissa inquired. She jabbed at Mr. Peanut, attempting to shove him away. "When?"

"This morning, like I said. Some batty old baggage all wearing orange drapes.” He thrust out a brown envelope. "Here, take it, will you? I'm late."

She did, and he ran off, whistling for his dog. Mr. Peanut stopped growling, cocked his head, and raced away after him. 

"Nothing on it," Sacharissa said, turning it over. It felt stiff. “No stamp, no postmark, no address…”

"That little rat[1] tore my trousers." William stood on one leg and held the other foot up while he ran a hand over his calf, checking for bites. "Open it later, Sass, we're late for work ourselves."

She'd already torn open one edge. She started walking to show willing, holding her umbrella in the crook of her arm, but drew out the envelope’s contents. Five sheets with the rigidity of iconographs, but too big, with one side ridged with a linen-like pattern and the other smooth and glossy against her gloved fingers. She flipped them over. The first three were of a huge, grand, ornate house. It had towers and fountains and ornate sculpture, an erstwhile castle. The fourth was of a glum-looking bunch of Klatchian horses, their dished faces turned in snooty profile, surrounded by fields of cabbage[2].

The fifth made her suck in a breath. “William!"

"What?" He sounded brusque, but Sacharissa barely registered the tone.

"William, it's us! But..." It was them, she'd seen their faces in so many iconographs by now she knew them as well as she knew her letters. But there were eerie, subtle differences.

Sacharissa, in a finer gown than any she’d ever worn or even dreamed of wearing, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and William stood behind her with a hand on her shoulder. Their hands and faces seemed strangely pale and ashy, and their eyes were dark and shadowed.

William’s umbrella bumped against hers. “That’s not us. Is it?”

She traced a finger around his picture’s face. “That’s certainly you, but… you seem…” It seemed almost like the people in the picture had recovered recently from an illness. There was a hollowness to their cheeks, a burning kind of hunger to their faces.

He took the iconograph gently from her hands. “Look at the picture frames behind them. Those must be bigger than the ones in -“ He broke off. He pointed at something in the background. “Sacharissa, what do you see there?”

“It’s a mirror. I don’t see anything -“ She almost dropped her umbrella. “I don’t see reflections!”

[1] Owing to his long business partnership with dwarfs, there was something admiring to the way William used the word ‘rat’. It indicated a kind of respect for something small, irritating, and bloodyminded. It matched Mr. Peanut to a tee.  
[2] The fine boned, high-spirited creatures in the middle of the monotonous cabbage-covered Sto Plains were about as incongruous as shaggy Rimtop yaks dumped into the steaming rainforests of Howondaland. Or a highly caffeinated, nervous wreck of a finals-week university student dropped in the middle of a carefully groomed zen garden.


	9. Chapter 9

Donni Longsnap was hovering by the front door of the editorial offices, and he grabbed William’s sleeve as he dashed in. “Where’ve you been?! We’re late to press! Come look it over -“

“Whatever’s in there, I approve it. Have you seen Otto?”

Donni’s small face, what was visible of it between his red beard and his tidy bowler hat, wrinkled with confusion. “He’s in his cellar -“

Sacharissa got to the cellar door first, but William was only a step behind. For once, he didn’t clutch the handrail and creep down. He took the steps three at time. “Otto!”

There was a rustling and scrabbling noise close at hand, and then the glow of a match in Sacharissa’s hand. “There’s a lamp somewhere along this wall,” she said, mouth a grim line, groping out into the dark. Her hand hit a frosted glass bulb. She raised it and lit the wick inside.

The yellow light glowed out into the room, revealing the strange, humped shapes of iconographs on tables, and on pictures stacked in short, untidy heaps. And on Otto, sitting on a stool with his knees drawn up and his face buried in his hands.

He looked like a youth, hurt and curled in on himself and trying not to cry. “Otto?” Sacharissa asked. They approached him, stopping an armslength away. William reached out, set a hand on Otto’s shoulder, then yanked it back with a stifled curse.

Otto was ice cold. William shook out his hand. His fingers had gone numb, even through his gloves. But it had caught Otto’s attention. His head jerked up and he stared at them with wild crimson eyes. “Vhat?” he breathed. “How you are here?”

A smart remark lined on William’s tongue, we work here, Otto, but instead he put the five pictures from the envelope on the table. Sacharissa shooed a few imps away to make room to spread them out and tapped her finger on one of the glossy shots. “Do you have any idea what these are?”

He only kept looking back and forth between the two of them, his face twisted up like a man with a wound. William slammed a hand on the table, and Otto jumped. “ _This_ picture here, Otto. Explain this.”

Slowly his chin lowered and he peeled his gaze away from them. When he saw the iconograph, the two vampires who looked like William and Sacharissa, he froze. For nearly a minute, he sat as still as stone, not a muscle moving. William bit his tongue, waiting. Sacharissa’s hands trembled on the table.

Otto collapsed.

William caught him before his head hit the table. Despite the freezing chill emanating from his body, he put an arm around him, supporting his neck and head. 

“He alright?!” Sacharissa rushed around the table, reaching out to touch and reassure herself.

“Don’t know,” William gasped. How were they supposed to tell with Otto?

Fortunately, the swoon didn’t last. Otto’s eyelids fluttered. With a groan, his eyes flicked open. He seized their hands, one each. “Oh, good. I seem to have been dreaming.”

“Dreaming? Is that what all this has bee-“

Otto saw the picture again. He jerked back like it was a coiled snake; his shoulder hit William’s chest with bruising force. “No,” he whispered. “No, that was a nightmare. I wouldn’t -“

He looked at them with desperation. “Where did you get zis?”

“That’s what we want to know,” William grunted, rubbing his sternum.

“Some woman left it for us,” Sacharissa explained. “You don’t have a clue, either?”

He looked away evasively, then let loose of William’s hand to pluck up the iconograph by the corner, like he was holding a dead rat. “I have something, but it is not a real thing. I wrestled with it all last night and I beat it down.”

Sacharissa squeezed his hand. “Otto, William and I have only the faintest notion of what’s going on here. Please give us the why’s and wherefore’s, if you’ve got any.”

Otto glanced at the other iconographs. “I don’t know ze castle, or ze horses. But zis…” He dropped the portrait onto the table. “I have been fighting, lately…” He trailed off, biting his lip, shamefaced.

There were pins and needles in William’s arm and down his front where Otto was still leaning against him. Nonetheless, he pulled Otto to him a little more securely. “Out with it, old chap.”

He heaved a deep sigh. “I have been fighting my fear. You know of pre-grief?”

Sacharissa shook her head. Will said, “We’re at sea there, I’m afraid.”

“It is ze loss you feel before the real loss happens? The anticipation of great and heart-breaking emotional pain? You do not know it?”

“Oh,” said Sacharissa. “When you put it that way, I suppose we do.”

“It is very intense, for a vampire. I began think of vhat must happen someday, when you two leave without me. A shameful desire rose inside me.” His hand clenched around Sacharissa’s. “I thought to myself, vhat if I turned zem? Vhat if I never, never had to lose zem?”

William swallowed. “You were going to turn us into vampires?”

Otto met his eyes. “It was a hard battle. Light is eternal. Before I met you two, I had never loved anything mortal.”

“Oh, Otto,” Sacharissa sighed and slid her arms around them. “You poor thing.”

William rested his head against Otto’s. “Listen, dear chap. You’re in the newspaper business, the most transient and ephemeral work in the world. How have you managed to avoid confronting this sort of thing ’til now?”

“I don’t know. It all crashed upon me at once, I feel.”

Sacharissa made a humming noise. “And how are you feeling now?”

He was quiet for a minute, and so still that William feared he’d fainted again. “Loved,” he said finally, very quiet. “Dearly loved.”

William pressed a kiss to his cool temple and heard Sacharissa sigh, “Good.”

They stood that way for a while. At some point while they were talking, the presses had started next door and a fine golden rain of dust came floating down through the slatted floor above.

“Hey,” said William suddenly. “We still haven’t the foggiest idea who the old lady was.”


	10. Chapter 10

A little wrinkly woman with wisps of white hair sticking out from under orange wimple swept the last mud from the Times’ stoop, smiled to herself, and hobbled down the not-very-gleaming street. The stoop would get soiled again, soon enough, but it was clean at this moment. In the words of the wise Ms. Cosmopolite, “Dishes always need doing, clothes always need mending.” Such was the way of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this read, Delphi! I had great fun working out a scenario for the newspaper OT3 and writing out some of my everpresent feelings over "immortal being getting all worked up over the transience of life". I don't think we know of an upper limit for Discworld vampire ages, do we?


End file.
